A Very Big Mistake

The gluteal hypertrophy that is Daveybloke's Secretary of Ghettos is worrying about property values again. Eric Pickles, who shot to fame on the BBC's Question Time through charging the taxpayer for a second home in London because he considered himself too fragile for a thirty-mile commute, has been telling the Daily Torygraph how concerned he is about middle-class families. The Liberal Democrats have revived the idea of a tax on expensive properties, which was among the parts of their manifesto thrown out in order to buy Wee Nicky his dog-basket outside Daveybloke's bedroom door. The manifesto pledge was for a tax on properties worth more than two million pounds; according to Pickles, the losers would be "ordinary middle-class families", the kind of people who "put a lot into this country and don't take a lot out", possibly because they cannot afford to emulate hard-working paragons like Lord Ashcroft or the Souter and Gloag comedy duo. "People will suddenly find themselves in a mansion and they hadn't realised it was a mansion," Pickles warned. It is doubtless understandable that a member of the House of Expenses Claimants might worry about ordinary people's ability to count up to two million, but I am sure some of us can manage it. "If it is only going to be mansions, the kind of thing you and I would regard as a mansion, it ain't going to raise very much," Pickles continued, in that delightful folksy way that he must have picked up from such People's Princes as Daveybloke and Osborne; well, in difficult times every pinchable penny must of course be pinched, and I am sure Pickles of all people has not forgotten that we're all in it together. Axing the Booktrust grant would have raised a paltry thirteen million, but the Government was nothing loath; at least until the idea was discovered to have been Michael Gove's.

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